Thursday, March 31, 2016

Brigitte Gabriel is a Lebanese-American fundie TV pundit who
used to work for Middle East Television when it was owned by the South Lebanon
Army (a Christian militia allied with Israel; the station was later sold to Pat Robertson).
Today, she travels the world giving presentations sponsored by wingnut groups,
mostly claiming that Jews Muslims are conspiring to seize power in the
world, while promoting her personal biography describing her as a victim of
Hezbollah and Palestinian terrorists. Gabriel’s anti-Islam rhetoric does have
the kind of disconcerting quality that have made many Jewish groups
uncomfortable with her, but her hysterical conspiracy mongering has been
happily picked up by various wingnut organizations, websites such as the WND,
and events such as the Values Voter Summit 2015.
And there is reason to be afraid, apparently: According to Gabriel,
there are up to 300 million Muslims who want to be suicide bombers out there.
Moreover, you should remember that it is impossible for Muslims to assimilate into American society, apparently
because only Christians can be true Americans. Gabriel has accordingly endorsed Donald Trump’s proposal to ban Muslims from entering America, claiming in the process that “he is the General Patton of our lifetime.” Here is her take on the common “America will not survive if X wins the election
argument.

Gabriel heads ACT! for America (formerly American Congress for Truth), an organization that has tied up with
various rightwing groups to promote some common and silly conspiracy theories –
in particular the delusion that they have to pass laws banning the supposed danger of American courts being taken over by sharia law.
Among her other targets are American public schools,
whose students are currently being “indoctrinated in Islam” through their
history textbooks, which have turned classrooms into “recruiting grounds for
Islam” (her group even got the Alabama state board of education to delay
approval of history textbooks due to their complaints).
She is also somewhat nonplussed that “Jewish leftists in this country” such as
Anti-Defamation League president Abraham Foxman “are eager to embrace Islam.” The
target of blame, she concludes, should be the universities, which are teaching more
complex and accurate “anti-America
and anti-Israel” material – with the help of Saudi oil money. President Obama’s
anti-American attitude is also “a direct result of what is being taught at our
universities.” And presumably because he spent his childhood as a fanatic
Muslim who attended a religious “madrassa” and grew up “praying just like Osama bin Laden prayed”.
In fact, he is still a Muslim, according to Gabriel,
and a terrorist supporter, a conclusion she can safely make on the observation
that she disagrees with him on policy issues.

In 2014 there was much consternation among various less
intelligent wingnuts in the wake of the announcement that the federal
government will relinquish oversight of the Internet to a US-backed nonprofit.
Gabriel’s response was among the more impressively
stupid one.
According to Gabriel, Obama is handing the internet over the UN control (which
is, in fact, more or less precisely the opposite of what the administration
did), and it will lead to the imposition of Sharia law on the Internet. It is
hard to reconcile that claim with the assumption that she does, in fact, know
what sharia law is. Or the internet. (She doesn’t have the faintest clue what
was actually happing, of course, but that is less surprising.)

Here is Gabriel agreeing with Dennis Michael Lynch that Obama (“a girly man in an empty suit sitting in the White House endangering the country”)
is intentionally allowing ISIS to gain territory in order to cause a refuge
crisis that he can use as an excuse to settle said refugees in the US to
forcibly “intermingle America.” No, the step from there to demanding an end to
lizard people mind control over Americans through chemtrails is not a big one.

Here is the leader for the Texas chapter of ACT! for
America, Dorrie O’Brien, talking about stealth jihad;
yes, these people are in all seriousness promoting ideas that remarkably
resemble the most medieval ideas of the kind of Taliban-style fundamentalism
they imagine that Muslims in general support.

Diagnosis: It is interesting (but hardly surprising) that
groups like Gabriel’s tend to promote policy suggestions and a sense of
paranoia that to a very large extent resemble the target of their paranoia. As
for Gabriel herself, there are reasonable people who take her seriously. Don’t.
Brigitte Gabriel is a deranged conspiracy theorist.

Wednesday, March 30, 2016

CAM treatments like acupuncture do not work better than placebo. Some CAM defenders have accordingly gone the
predictable route – the dumbest route – and argued that this very fact not only
doesn’t show that the CAM treatments in question don’t work (which is what it
does show), but that it vindicates The Secret.
That’s right: the placebo effect demonstrates the efficacy of the Law of Attraction;
the Law of Attraction being the idea that if you really want something strong
enough, magical forces in the Universe will vibrate them into existence for you
(the religious version often involves the intermediate step of sending money to your local
televangelist) – that is, the idea that wishful thinking can replace hard work, because magic. CAM regimes are, accordingly, really
magical rituals and artifacts you can deploy to channel the spiritual energies
of the universe.

This is for instance the theme of Sherry Gaba’s essay “The
Law of Attraction and the Placebo Effect”,
published on Deepak Chopra’s group blog IntentBlog, who introduces the placebo effect as “[p]eople that believe they are taking a
‘cure’ actually have mild to extremely positive results from taking the
placebo, leading to a partial to complete cure of the condition without any
real medical intervention.” That is a bit of a misdescription, of course.
The effect of the psychological side of the placebo effect only “work” for
subjective symptoms: Your psychological state doesn’t actually cure anything but at most (and
unreliably so) lead to change in subjective perception of the symptoms. (Other
effects lumped in with the psychological effect are effects of changed
behaviors of test subjects under observation: people participating in a test of
a weight loss drug tend to start doing all sorts of other things, like working
out and eating less, that have effects on the outcome – that doesn’t exactly
vindicate the Law of Attraction). To Sherry Gaba, however, “[t]he placebo effect is, in reality, the
medical proof that the Law of Attraction really works. The Law of Attraction
simply says that what you focus in on in your life is what you will receive. In
the medical case the patients taking the placebo focused in on becoming healthy
and overcoming a medical condition, which is exactly what happened. Some people
believed so strongly in the effectiveness of the placebo that they were
completely cured.” Which is not how the placebo effect works but how Gaba
presumably, well, wished that it worked. And just to emphasize the obvious: the
placebo effect does not vindicate bullshit alternative treatments.

In her dayjob Gaba is a “psychotherapist,
author and life coach” who specializes in “all addictions” using “traditional
and alternative techniques such as somatic experiencing and tapping.”
She is the author of The Law of Sobriety™:
Attracting Positive Energy for a Powerful Recovery, which lays out her
steps for curing addiction and “connect with a universal life force to create a
life filled with harmony and peace,” based on the law of attraction. The book
is praised as “a masterpiece” by Deepak Chopra

She’s not the only CAM advocate to make startlingly
ridiculous claims on behalf of placebo. Robert Schiffman thinks placebo effects
are proof of the existence of God.

Diagnosis: Admittedly more of a promoter of fluffy corporate
newspeak bullshit than a promoter of pastel energy dolphin teleportations. Her
fluffy corporate newspeak law of attraction stuff is nevertheless exasperating
bullshit.

Tuesday, March 29, 2016

Charles Fuqua (I don’t know how it is pronounced) was a
candidate for the state legislature in Arkansas in 2012, and garnered
substantial financial support from the Republican party, at least until someone
close-read his book God’s Law: The Only
Political Solution, which advocated not only a theocracy based on Old
Testament Law, but even tried actively to justify some of the more unsavory elements
of that suggestion. So for instance, Fuqua did argue for the idea that unruly children should be put to death like it says in the Bible.
Yeah, that’s right: Death penalty for disobedient children at their parents’
discretion (as long as they follow “proper procedure”,
which was presumably filing the request with the elders of the town). Oh, but
it’s not really bad: You see, it would have (probably unlike the death penalty
for adults) a deterrent effect and wouldn’t be used often since parents love
their children so much that they would probably almost never want them to be
put to death. Which would, according to Fuqua’s own reasoning, presumably defeat the purpose,
but there is reason to think that Charles Fuqua at this stage in his argument
would have had some trouble recognizing “conflicts of reasons”. He is also
firmly opposed to abortion.

In the same book, Fuqua also advocated expelling Muslims from the U.S. (we know: fairly anticlimactic at this stage),
saying it would solve what he described as the “Muslim problem.” We haven’t
bothered to figure out precisely what that problem is, but he has described
liberals and Muslims as the “anti-Christ” and said that he believes they are
conspiring to create a “bloody revolution.” The uniting principle is, of
course, that they are enemies of Christianity, and follow the principle that
“my enemy’s enemy is my friend.”

It is worth mentioning that the Arkansas legislature was at
this time already saddled with Loy Mauch, who has defended slavery and denounced Abraham Lincoln as a Nazi and Marxist. We’ll return to him.

Diagnosis:
Whoops. I guess it’s a tough game to stand out among the fringe nutters in the
state legislatures. Fuqua has hopefully crawled back into whatever hole he
emerged from.

Sunday, March 27, 2016

More anti-gay ridiculousness, this time from Aaron Fruh, an
Alabama pastor who seems to be treated as an authority on the issue of
homosexuality by the American Family Association and who was picked up by Janet Porter’s coalition Israel: You Are Not Alone, which is campaigning against any concession Israel might
make to the Palestinians on the grounds that giving Palestinians land or rights
is a direct cause of terrorism.

Fruh claims that any society that has failed to oppress gays
has been destroyed by God: “So when it comes to civilization and society, God
knew that the people of the earth were going to destroy themselves through
same-sex marriage,” said Fruh,
“so that’s why he brought the flood.” So just you dare! Like so many others
Fruh also claims that marriage equality is actually “heterophobic” because it discriminates
against heterosexuals and “against the unborn children who will never see the
light of day if you revise the historical, moral and legal view of traditional
marriage.” In other words, he appears to believe allowing gays and lesbians to
marry means taking away heterosexual couples’ right to marry and have children,
and that banning homosexual marriage will make homosexuals enter into
heterosexual marriages instead. In fact, marriage equality is the “height of
bigotry,” and gays and lesbians are “hateful and malicious” toward married
heterosexuals (yes: he takes advocacy of gay marriage to be a direct attack on him for being non-homosexually married),
but his arguments make it rather abundantly clear that Fruh doesn’t really
understand what it means to be “hateful and malicious” against groups of
people, or what “bigotry” involves.

Diagnosis: Fruh has emphasized that “I don’t consider myself
homophobic,” but it really doesn’t matter how he considers himself. Fruh is abysmally
homophobic. And angry. And evil.

Saturday, March 26, 2016

Catherine Frompovich is an antivaccine loon who writes for the International Medical Council on Vaccination (an
Orwellian name if there ever was one) and has (proudly) co-authored several
papers with anti-vaccine legendHarold Buttram.
In particular, Frompovich, who claims to have a degree in “orthomolecular therapy,”
which is not a medical degree, is most familiar for touting the idea that
shaken baby syndrome (SBS) (or, as it is correctly termed, “abusive head
trauma”) does not only not exist, but is really a misdiagnosis for vaccine
injury, an idea (discussed here)
“so unbelievable and so outrageous that” that it should have “died off by now
through the sheer contempt and ridicule so justly heaped upon it by anyone with
a modicum of critical thinking skills.” Of which, unfortunately, Frompovich is
in short supply. She’s also a bit desperate for evidence for her delusion,
naturally enough, and will apparently use anything that comes her way,
regardless of quality and even if it does in no way even purport to support her idea.
In fact, Frompovich has (with Buttram) even made presentations on SBS for the
FDA. We do not know how the FDA reacted, but we suspect they’re used to facepalming.

Frompovich still believes that “vaccines DO cause autism.”
Not only that, but the FDA, official health agencies and pharmaceutical
companies know this. As evidence she, well, uses whatever seems to come her
way, such as vaccine court rulings,
which do, to put it mildly, not indicate that any such connection exists –
Frompovich is fond of dumpster diving in the VAERS database,
something anti-vaxxers are fond of and which is proof as good as any that they
have no idea how evidence works, and Frompovich truly loved this one,
which itself demonstrates that she has no idea what its significance might be.
She also links to scientific studies that she has apparently not read and far less understood.
Par for the course.

Her work has also been published by Age of Autism and VacTruth.org – notably an article with the title “Aborted Human Fetal Cells in Vaccines”
(yes, that gambit;
only the purest and craziest of antivaxx morons dare run that one.) And she is
the author of a book, Vaccination Voodoo:
What YOU Don’t Know About Vaccines, which does, indeed, tell you a lot of
stuff neither you nor Frompovich or anyone else know or could know about
vaccines – it has as much to do with reality as Time Cube. Here is a deconstruction of one of her articles on Gardasil.
Needless to say, she has no idea what she is talking about.

Diagnosis: Fuming conspiracy theorist. As such, she has made
a name for herself among other fuming conspiracy theorists and the darker parts
of comment sections on health-related articles. Crazy as shit, and anyone who
ever cites any of her stuff has automatically lost whatever argument they were
engaged in and should be laughed out of the room.